Writing, Dammit!

Been a while, but I'm actually getting the work done. On my way into the dark heart of Chapter 4. And I'm gonna keep at it. Seems like a better idea than updating this thing. But, eventually, I'll start doing that regularly, too. Promise.

Like A Gargoyle

So I've started reading The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson, that publishing industry noise/newsmaker that sold for $1.25 million and has unfortunately already dropped off the NY Times bestseller list after a run of only a few weeks.

Anyway, it really is a wonderful book, deep and dark and masterfully written. I'd have given the Mr. Davidson that big check, too. Since I've been blabbering about writing so much lately, I found this passage at the beginning of Gargoyle quite apt, because the unnamed narrator sounds an awful like Aaron, our protagonist in Swallowed, who, coincidentally, is 35 himself:

The most difficult thing about writing, I'm discovering, is not the act of constructing the sentences themselves. It's deciding what to put in, and where, and what to leave out. I'm constantly second-guessing myself. I chose the accident, but I could just as easily have started with any point in my thirty-five years before that.

I mean, yeah. At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, that's it, exactly, for Aaron, and for me.

Farewell, David Foster Wallace

I am broken-hearted.

DFW offed himself Friday, and though I was not a major fan—let’s face it, the man’s work wasn’t for book tourists or the easily daunted, and it was often challenging to process his dense thickets of prose, at least in a novel like Infinite Jest—I was glad he was in the world, writing like writing was all that mattered.

Because it was to him, and it is to me.

He was fucking funny, too, if you were in on the joke.

He will be missed, and mourned.

Here’s an entirely apt passage from “Good Old Neon,” from his story collection Oblivion:

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. The internal head-speed or whatever of these ideas, memories, realizations, emotions and so on is even faster, by the way – exponentially faster, unimaginably faster – when you're dying, meaning during that vanishingly tiny nanosecond between when you technically die and when the next thing happens, so that in reality the cliché about people's whole life flashing before their eyes as they're dying isn't all that far off – although the whole life here isn't really a sequential thing where first you're born and then you're in the crib and then you're up at the plate in Legion ball, etc., which it turns out that that's what people usually mean when they say 'my whole life,' meaning a discrete, chronological series of moments that they add up and call their lifetime. It's not really like that. The best way I can think of to try to say it is that it all happens at once, but that at once doesn't really mean a finite moment of sequential time the way we think of time while we're alive, plus that what turns out to be the meaning of the term my life isn't even close to what we think we're talking about when we say 'my life.' Words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of what's really going on at the most basic level. And yet at the same time English is all we have to try to understand it and try to form anything larger or more meaningful and true with anybody else, which is yet another paradox.

"…the whole my whole life flashed before me phenomenon at the end is more like being a whitecap on the surface of the ocean, meaning that it's only at the moment you subside and start sliding back in that you're really even aware there's an ocean at all. When you're up and out there as a whitecap you might talk and act as if you know you're just a whitecap on the ocean, but deep down you don't think there's really an ocean at all. It's almost impossible to."

Fuck You, Gustav. Thank You, Edna.

Thank God. Nothing major broke. The evacuation went smoothly. And the storm was not as bad as predicted. Now we can worry about other things, like 17-year-old unmarried mothers and Republicans in general.

And writing.

Shoulda gotten more done this weekend, didn't, as I was distracted by the hurricane and the Last Day Of Summer. I'm feeling good about the work, though, and I know I'll be cranking hard soon. I'm instituting a daily word quota, just to see if I can force myself to pile up a bunch of pages quickly. Like, a whole chapter's worth, stat. Should be easy-peesey, right? Since I have the whole book outlined and researched and everything.

Au contraire.

I much prefer rewriting to initial writing. Initial writing is way too much like real work, and I agonize over it far more than I need to. I always feel like I'm screwing up the story, or just plain sucking, and then the internal editor kicks in and I catch myself redoing the same paragraph seven times and then I stop in frustration.

Rewriting is much more fun and a bit easier, though agony often remains. 

Writing is not for sissies.

I happened across a quote from the great Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of classics like Show Boat and Giant, which I thought perfectly conveyed that sentiment. The lady knows of what she speaks; she wrote a few dozen plays and novels and was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, matching wits with contemporaries like Dorothy Parker.

Anyway, this is something she wrote in A Peculiar Treasure:

“Only amateurs write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain climbing, treadmill and childbirth. It may be absorbing, racking, relieving, but amusing, never.”

Well said, Edna.

I am definitely not amused.

God Bless And Godspeed, NOLA

Such a beautiful, beautiful town.

The first chapter of Swallowed is set in New Orleans, and I have been going down for Mardi Gras for the last five years (including the ugly one post-Katrina). I have several dear friends there, one of whom, a doctor, is riding out Gustav at the Tulane Medical Center. 

My heart is with him, and with NOLA and all its citizens, during this difficult time.

It’s Got A Good Beat And You Can Read To It

From the start I imagined this as a book with a soundtrack. I even considered making an actual soundtrack recording, on a CD included inside the front cover, but think of it: the rights for dozens of songs would be expensive and time-consuming to obtain, unless I pulled a Girltalk. 

I struggled to find the best way to communicate the importance of music to the story. Initially I had the genius brainstorm to make Aaron, our protagonist, constantly reference the music playing in his head, which he pithily referred to as Radio A. In the first draft of Chapter One, I had Radio A breaking in every so often to very self-consciously blast a song or a lyric. I tried different ways of doing it, including using the graphic at the top of this post, but it proved to be a clunky and awkward device, and it was already annoying after the first chapter. 

I gave it up.

I rewrote and cut out all the Radio A references and just got out of the way of the story. But the soundtrack was still there, whether I put it in the book or not. So I made one for myself on iTunes.

I used only songs released on or before the year 2000, the timeframe of the story. Here’s what I came up with for the first several chapters:

“Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand”—Primitive Radio Gods

“Radiohead”—Talking Heads

“Rise”—Public Image Limited

“My Own Worst Enemy”—Lit

“Instant Karma”—John Lennon

“Say My name“—Destiny’s Child

“Girls”—Beastie Boys

“Love Will Tear Us Apart”—Joy Division

“I Try”—Macy Gray

“All The Small Things”—Blink 182

“No Surprises”—Radiohead

“Love Song”—The Cure

“Gett Off”—Prince & The New Power Generation

“Love Buzz”—Nirvana

“One”—U2

“Back In Black”—ACDC

“Sweet Child O’ Mine”—Guns ’N’ Roses

“Right Here, Right Now”—Jesus Jones

“Even Better Than The Real Thing”—U2

“Music”—Madonna

“Take A Picture”—Filter

“Bad Reputation”—Freedy Johnston

“Teardrop”—Massive Attack

“Semi-Charmed Life“—Third Eye Blind

“Here Comes A Regular”—Replacements

“Bohemian Like You”—Dandy Warhols

“Brand New Lover”—Dead Or Alive

“Speechless”—School Of Fish

“Single”—Everything But The Girl

“Perfect”—Smashing Pumpkins

“Swallowed”—Bush

A song notably missing here is the one Aaron writes in Chapter One, “New Orleans Again.” This is in fact an actual song, written by me, and as I get this book done I’m going to try to convince the members of East Is East, my band of twenty years, to do me a solid and record it. 

Maybe I can put it on the audiobook. According to Augusten Burroughs, whose latest audiobook, A Wolf At The Table, is completely over the top, with sound effects and so much drama in Augusten’s voice, the audiobook is the new frontier for modern authors. We shall see.

In the meantime, I tried to make an iMix on iTunes, which would effectively render moot all the rights issues, cuz if you wanted one of the songs in my soundtrack, you’d simply download it and the artist would be paid like always. 

Unfortunately not all the songs I listed above are available on iTunes. 

A bunch of them are, though, so I went ahead and made the mix, and here it is. 

RAWK!

Cart Before The Horse

Even though I’ve only got three chapters of my would-be novel completed, I was wondering how, exactly, one pitches a novel to a publisher. I happened upon the blog of Nathan Bransford, an agent for Curtis Brown, who besides lots of encouragement offers a straightforward assessment of the publishing world and loads of tips on how to navigate it.

Anyway, step one, write a book. A whole, complete book. Step two, sell it to an agent by means of a query letter, in which everything in your 90,000 word novel is summed up in two sentences. 

This is actually a very good exercise, and also an excellent way to create a quick thumbnail of the whole story. 

So, here’s my first attempt to sum up Swallowed in two sentences:

Aaron Adler’s got it all, for a guy nowhere close to middle age: the high-profile design job in Washington DC, the beautiful and bewitching Jazny Phelps as his lover, and a taste for dunken excess that may finally be catching up with him. When Aaron’s colleague Marnie Chrisfield drowns in the Potomac on the hazy, crazy night he realizes he’s actually in love with her, he must face some huge decisions about his future, or risk not having one.

So, that’s a start. I’ll keep working on it.